The present invention relates to the development of merchandise line lists and data foundation establishment for merchandising related applications for use across a variety of sales and distribution channels, such as retail, wholesale, Internet and mail order.
Recently, the dividing lines in the retail, wholesale, Internet and mail order markets have begun to overlap as retailers, manufactures and wholesalers have expanded their businesses into all facets of the marketplace. This expansion by businesses has been in response to increasing competition and a corresponding increase in the amount of more sophisticated consumers. As consumers have become more demanding, the importance of maintaining a current and ever growing and evolving supply of inventory has increased. Consequently the development of flexible merchandising systems to help track, plan and manage product lines is essential.
However, prior art merchandising systems typically are limited to single and specific sales and distribution channels. For example, a wholesaler will have systems designed to work specifically with issues like shipping, warehousing, and advertising allowance which a retailer will have systems designed for store specific issues such as allocation and distribution and details. Current consumer tastes and demands have forced businesses to diversify not only their product offerings, but also the sales distribution channels through which they take their product to market, channels such as retail, wholesale, Internet and mail order. Accordingly, these conventional applications are not well suited to the tracking, planning and managing of inventory over multiple sales and distribution channels.
Furthermore, conventional systems also suffer from the inability to spontaneously change product classifications without losing the prior sales history of the products. Furthermore, these systems are also limited as to the number of product extensions which can be used in the system (i.e., wool sweaters (regular, big and tall, petite sizes)).
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a merchandising system which could develop merchandise line lists and establish a data foundation for merchandising related applications across a variety of sales and distribution channels.